


Faith and Misery

by AntipathicZora



Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), War of the Spark, do you ever just think about where your ocs are in the middle of a giant world-changing event, mentions fanplanes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 13:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19946770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntipathicZora/pseuds/AntipathicZora
Summary: Once upon a time, the multiverse's greatest evil converged on the plane of Ravnica in a ploy to become an all-mighty tyrant god. Many, many planeswalkers were summoned to stop him, only to be lured into a trap, as Bolas planned to use the city-plane as a slaughterhouse with which to harvest their sparks and use them to ascend. Many people gave their lives that fateful day, and Ravnica and its people were changed forever-more by the knowledge of what lies beyond their home.This is the chronicle of some of those poor souls who fought for their lives just outside the spotlight. They may not have had a hand in bringing down Nicol Bolas, but they have their own stories to tell nonetheless.





	Faith and Misery

Another nightmare.

Z’arith shook herself out of her bed of fancy pillows and searched around her tiny apartment for anything out of place, before hauling herself to the even tinier bathroom. If you could call it that, anyway. On her budget, it was more like a closet with a chamber pot and a rusted wash basin at the back. It was a far cry from the halls of a palace, but it was cozy, and homely, and that was what mattered to her above all else.

The enigmatic dreams had been plaguing her for a while now, leaving her with about as much sleep as if she had never slept at all. Indeed, she hadn’t been making much of a habit of it, these recent nights. Once she was certain her tiny flat was free of all infiltration, she sat down at a beaten up writing desk and began to scrawl down the contents of this dream in a diary with a gilded lily on the front of it.

In this latest dream, she had seen a vast, yawning darkness stretching wide over the city of Ravnica, dripping ever downward until it stained the spires and ran through the cracks in the cobble. She saw a host of many, standing on the opposite end of a battleground from a countless many more. One was made up of faces as numerous and varied as there were stars across the sky, and the other, a faceless army, hollow eye sockets glowing a malign violet. As the howls of war-dogs began, shining glimmers began to appear in that hungry void, only to be swallowed by the sheer dark above. Swallowed, never to return.

It was at least nice to see her own native language in a different setting, even if it was just her own handwriting. But to read over what she had spilled onto the page was much different. This dream had been the clearest one yet. Trying to think back on it was like trying to touch a hot stove bare-handed and hold her hand there. She didn’t want to remember it. She didn’t want to remember any of them, but after what had happened at home, she knew she needed to. To fail to remember the dreams plaguing her this time would be to fail everything she knew and loved. She had to face her fears. For the fate of her home, and possibly the multiverse.

She closed the journal again, then stared down at a pile of research notes relating to Dominarian history, particularly an essay about the time of five elder dragons, and the fell sword forged by Dakkon Blackblade. At one time, the idea of slaughtering dragons would have horrified her. But these days, she knew better. She knew she and her people were alone amongst the stars. Today, she didn’t feel like she could continue with that essay. She felt sick to her stomach, and to feel sick was to put her beyond the grasp of academics.

Maybe some coffee would help.

Coffee was a new concept to her, but it was one that she very much wished she could bring home with her. A hot, bitter nectar that kept her awake, and kept her nightmares away. Z’arith grew fond of it in the time she had been living a second life on this plane. She wished she could have the beans planted in her gardens, have it no matter where she was staying at the time, but she knew she wasn’t yet capable of such a feat. Maybe she never would be, she didn’t know.

She thought about this more as she began to pull on her intricate disguise.

Sari from Kaladesh, bought at a time when she was still learning the art of planeswalking from a strange new friend, draped delicately over fur and muscle. Journeymage’s cloak from the halls of the Tolarian Academy, where she had landed when she sparked, large enough to hide the bright brassy wings at her back and the scaled tail to her behind. Cone-like sedge hat from Kamigawa, where she had first finally met others sort of like her, that was made in just such a way that her long, gently curved horns looked like a part of it. It covered her cinnabar mane and pressed down her large ears into what was left. And finally, a scarf, a pair of boots, and gloves from here on Ravnica, which she had bought to hide her sharp claws, digitigrade feet, and canine snout.

Anything else, she usually followed up with having relatives in the Simic. They usually bought it, to be fair. Fox-like features were hardly the strangest thing to walk out of the halls of the Simic Combine.

Windows locked tight, plants watered. Important documents locked away and secured. Refreshed the etched warding glyphs on the window and door frames. When all of that was squared away, only then did she feel safe to leave her apartment and descend the halls down to street level.

Z’arith exited the building and stepped into the cold bite of Ravnica’s autumn air. It was a far cry from the hot desert winds she was born into, and she wondered if she could ever be used to it. Whatever the case, it snapped her awake as soon as she stepped into it, and she drew it deep into her lungs, taking in the unique smells of the city. The cafe across the street, and the smell of hundreds on hundreds of people. The faint odor of smog in the air from industry, and the tinge of sulphur from a building to her left that definitely wasn’t a front for a Rakdos club. A wet, musky scent from some entrance to the Undercity, carried on the breeze. And, above it all, the smell of rain.

It had been raining a lot, lately.

These last few weeks, the constant storms had been the only thing driving her back home. She hated the feeling of wet fur, more than she hated the constant looming fear overhanging the entire plane. Back home, they had no idea what was going on, and it was a welcome break to hear from her guardsmen. But she knew she needed to be here. There was no other way she would be having such terrible, awful dreams. The dreams came to her before the Mana Flux, and she ignored them. And since she ignored them, she was woefully unprepared for the moment the guards brought her to the throne, or the moment the blue leyline awoke.

This time, the dreams wouldn’t catch her off-guard. She had chased the signs she had seen in them across the multiverse, and studied them as best she could. She knew of the threat looming overhead. Of one spark surviving above all others, and of murmurs across the planes of a great and terrible dragon.

Of course it was a dragon.

Knowing about him, by itself, was enough to make her hide herself beneath many layers of clothing, just so she could tell people she wasn’t like him. She was no longer proud of who she was. She hated herself, because in those tyrant hellkites, she saw herself.

Her usual cafe seat beckoned to her across the road, and who was she to just ignore it? She sat down and placed her order, setting a few zibs on the counter as payment. Coffee would never hurt Z’arith. Coffee didn’t care that she was a dragon, didn’t care that she might be like them. Coffee was like a warm, bitter friend, waiting for her with its arms wide open at the end of a long day. Give me your tired, your poor, it said, your huddled masses of sad half-dragons yearning to not sleep, the wretched refuse of the multiverse, and Coffee will shape them in its image.

When her mug was set down before her, next to a small plate with a few rolls, pats of butter, and slices of meat, she started to contemplate her place in all of this. Was any of this really worth the constant nightmares, she wondered? She could easily just go home, go back to Chrontomus, sit on her throne and forget this ever happened. Just like her sister wanted.

That gave Z’arith pause. Since when was she willing to listen to An’haiyith? No. No, she had abandoned her. Once upon a time, Z’arith would have been willing to think that her twin had ordered the almost-assassination that had caused her to spark, but no. No, no. Even if she couldn’t take her word for it, why would she do that? She was crazy and clingy to the point that she would learn necromancy just to keep Z’arith alive in some form.

On top of that, she knew that An’haiyith was here on this plane, too. Because why would Z’arith ever be able to escape that nutcase, right? Why couldn’t she have just one place to herself. The best she could do now was just avoid her, and keep her windows and door locked and warded. After all, no one really trusted the Dimir, did they?

She stared down at a glimmering ring on her hand made of the finest platinum and set with a single large stone each of diamond, ruby and sapphire. No, An’haiyith couldn’t make her go home now. Not after everything she had seen. She was taking this seriously, and this wedding band was proof of that more than anything. It would be unbefitting of a ruler to leave her kingdom without a king, if something was going to converge. It had happened quietly, a few nights ago. No one but her, her now-husband Jackin, and the one who had overseen their marriage.

Whatever was coming, if she survived it, she could have the grand ceremony she dreamed of later.

She scanned the streets near the cafe. Everything was quiet today. Too quiet, to Z’arith. No Gruul starting trouble. No Rakdos street performances. Just a bunch of passers-by, keeping their heads as low as hers. Every so often, an Azorius arrester on patrol. That might have been why, she thought. In the months since she had come here, their stranglehold on freedom had only grown tighter. It was strange, uncomfortable, and frankly frightening. The Rakdos, with their macabre arts, forced into hiding. The Golgari, all but gone from the surface. Maybe An’haiyith did have a point about freedom and independence. She feared everything the Azorius had become. Even a broken clock was right twice a day.

In the distance, loomed that strange Izzet contraption that had allegedly been under construction since shortly after the Guildpact disappeared. Their parun, their guild-founder, had been in hiding, and now the figure at the helm of the League was a man named Ral Zarek. He was a powerful storm mage, she’d heard, and she didn’t doubt that many of the thunderstorms hanging overhead were the result of his strange constructions. In a way, she admired him and his strange magic. If she could command storms like he could, she could bring a little more life to her dry, dry desert and augment the oases that had sprung up. It tempted her more than any other guild on Ravnica to join. It prodded at her sense of wonder and creativity, her native curiosity.

But she knew better than to join a guild when they were preparing for war. She wasn’t the only one who knew something wicked was coming. The tensions in the air were thick enough that she could cut through them like her breakfast butter pats. Everybody suspected each other of the things going wrong, and attacked each other for it. Even she wasn’t immune to pointing fingers. She feared the majority of the Gruul from the rioting. They had wounded her multiple times as she simply tried to defend civilians. She wanted desperately to believe in Dimir sabotage, if only just to have a reason to continue to be angry at her sister.

Another cup of coffee, another tip for the cute little goblin waitress that served her. It was a good trade-off. Z’arith didn’t have much money here on Ravnica, only what she could scrounge together through busking on street corners every day. But goblins didn’t care. They only wanted to be paid in shiny things. Some things never changed, she supposed.

She couldn’t help but continue to stare at the strange device being constructed in the distance. What even was it? It looked near-finished by now, and this whole time she had hoped that what it did would eventually become clear as it grew upward and pierced the skies. But no, the meaning of the thing still eluded her. Perhaps it was a super-weapon? If all the guilds were preparing for a war, it would make sense for the League to want their own leverage. Or maybe it was a generator experiment, like the Blistercoils. She knew that the answer to most of the League’s problems tended to be ‘more power’, so it was a distinct possibility.

She wondered how much it would matter, in the face of what was to come. She tried to think about her latest dream some more, tried to contemplate the meaning of it all, but nothing doing. She found herself transfixed by the device, unable to help herself but to try to decipher the enigmatic building’s true purpose. Maybe it was the inverse of what she thought. Maybe instead of creating the storms, Ral Zarek was powered by the storms, and this strange object was some means of controlling the weather and coating the plane in permanent stormclouds. Was he that vain? She didn’t really know. She had only ever really seen him once in person, and it was from a distance as he passed outside of her apartment.

One more mug of coffee. Black, so dark it could count as a chemical weapon. Another five zibs on the table.

Perhaps it wasn’t a device at all. Maybe it was the staging zone of a brand new grand laboratory, to put the guildhall of Nivix to shame. Or perhaps it was some odd ‘particle accelerator’, and they planned on experimenting with quantum temporal magic. That was a bad idea as far as she knew. Experiments like that were what destroyed the original Tolarian Academy, according to the research notes for her essay. Maybe they planned on addressing the potential threat by using that thing to take the plane, and push it somewhere else.

…. No, no, that was even stupider than the quantum magic. How do you push a plane?

Now, she tucked into her rolls and meats. She still watched the thing, racking her brains on what it could possibly be used for. But there was no sense using up all of her limited brainpower on an empty stomach. Ravnican breakfasts were very light, definitely too light to fill a half-dragon like her, but it would keep her going for a while. These days she needed the energy.

As she ate, she watched her coffee. The liquid was rippling something fierce, more than the footsteps of civilians had aught to cause.

It wasn’t a second after she noticed that, that she was thrown out of her usual seat by a horrible thundering noise and a shockwave the likes of which she had never once felt in her life. The mug of coffee spilled over onto her cloak, and then Z’arith was sent tumbling into the cafe wall behind her, lodging her horns into the cracks between the brick and sending her into confused, dizzy, disorientation. All of a sudden, there was screaming. She felt her unfurled tail get stepped on by fleeing civilians as she struggled to free her head from the masonry.

When her horns finally pulled free of the cracks, the skyline to the far north was much different than what she had seen only a few minutes prior.

Where once there had been all manner of assorted spires, now there stood a tremendous, boxy structure that dwarfed most of the buildings in the city. It looked almost as if it had come from a desert like her home, but at the same time, much different. Much more sinister. On the flat, otherwise-featureless top of it, there stood some sort of altar, or throne, or shrine, and standing atop that, the figure of a dragon, with wings spread wide and horns that she had only seen once before, in her research notes.

Oh, no.

A shadow passed overhead, visible even in the dim light of an overcast Ravnica. When Z’arith looked up, she saw the elegant frills depicted in the symbol of the Izzet League, and knew that this must be their parun. She watched, transfixed and disoriented, as the dragon called Niv-Mizzet approached the structure, and attempted to invoke something or another. In the dizziness from the impact, she was really rather uncertain as to what was going on, as it looked as if there were three of him at the moment. She knew this dragon was a far more powerful mage than she could ever comprehend, and for a blessed second, she felt as sure as the civilians that he would be able to put an end to this before it began.

And then, her sobriety returned and she watched in horror as the parun was struck from the sky, dead as a doornail.

Now, the panic set in. She sprung to her feet, threw the coffee-stained Journeymage cloak off of her body and onto the ground, and spread her wings wide. She felt a pull in her heart toward that odd device she had been contemplating not five minutes before, and turned to see it ignited. A beacon, splitting the clouds in the sky and beaming up into the yawning void beyond the plane. Then, a thunderclap, then another, then a hundred more. All manner of beings, appearing around her through bolts of magic and mystic portals and impacts like falling stars.

Other planeswalkers. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Answering the same pull in their hearts as she felt right now. Was that the device’s true purpose? A help beacon? How long had they known that this was coming?

Z’arith took off into the sky and made way for Precinct One. Maybe there was a ghost of a chance that the Guildpact had finally come home. She had to try. She had to find him. She wasn’t much for the richie-rich bourgeoisie of the precinct, but she knew that the Hall of the Guildpact was there. It wasn’t his personal home, in fact it was said that he was next to never there, but she had to try.

When the Hall was in her sights, she dove downward. If she could just get inside, past the fleeing people-

Another shockwave sent her hurtling to the ground. She landed on her back with a sickening _crunch_ sound, and howled into the air in pain. Her wing, _her fucking wing._

Despite the stabbing pain in her wing, she jumped to her feet again, fully prepared to make a dash into the Hall of the Guildpact… only to find that the Hall of the Guildpact was no more.

There was nothing left of the grand building but bits of rubble. In its place, a swirling tear in space and time, leading to a shattered and broken, ruined desert. And through it, poured an army. Countless soldiers plated in an unnaturally blue metal, skeletal remains of what might have been people once, but now were a fell horde. From the second they emerged, they took no quarter, acting with terrifying coordination and precision to slaughter anything in their way.

Z’arith’s first instinct was to flee. Maybe she could get help, find somebody who the beacon hadn’t summoned, or at very least, tell her husband she loved him one last time. She tried to reach back into the Blind Eternities to pull her way home, but the Reality surrounding Ravnica slapped her backward like it never had before. In the stunned moments of realization, she saw the sign of the Azorius flash in bright white glyphs in the air before her.

She was trapped.

Everyone here was trapped. Called like sheep to the slaughter.

The horde of blue moved ever toward her, unflinching and unrelenting. With no other options, she threw off her scarf and gloves, discarded her hat, and kicked off her boots.

Now all of Ravnica knew planeswalkers existed. The least she could do was show them that not even close to all of them were like that damnedable dragon.


End file.
